


holes in the sky

by Fanless



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Angst, Depressing, Gen, Loneliness, Multiplicity/Plurality, POV Second Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26726347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fanless/pseuds/Fanless
Summary: in·com·plete | /ˌinkəmˈplēt/: adjective. Not having all the necessary or appropriate parts.(In which the shards of Zarc, having been joined, are separated.)
Relationships: Sakaki Yuya & Yugo & Yuri & Yuto
Comments: 12
Kudos: 34





	holes in the sky

_You were supposed to be a part of me, and now you're gone._

* * *

Some days the absence feels like a torn wound. You reach up to grab your pendant for comfort and register faint shock when you realize the flesh behind it isn't actually gaping open and hollow; that's just how your chest feels most days now. You got so accustomed to feeling the others pulse inside it, making your heart warm when they sense something interesting happening outside your body or flutter when they're excited or even sink and tense when they're nervous even if you're not.

But they're not there anymore. They're home... in their own dimensions, now that they've been separated again. You're not part of each other any more. You can't hear what each other is thinking, you can't see through each others' eyes.

Your worlds are safe; at least as safe as they were before.

Leo Akaba's experiment was a failure after all.

Somehow, despite nothing logical pointing to it, you feel like one as well.

* * *

_You held me up so steadfastly, and now you're gone._

* * *

The one you probably notice the absence of the most is Yuuto. He was the first to merge with you, after all; it wasn't what either of you expected and it wasn't intentional, but it hadn't taken long to feel completely natural. His voice had become a comforting constant in the back of your head, offering play-by-plays and reassurance. You'd see him out of the corner of your eye sometimes too; just flickers that would make you think you'd imagined it, but more often than not you'd catch the minor movement that meant a smile directed at you and _know_ what you'd seen. You got really good at passing control of your body to him, and him to you: it felt like being suspended in water almost, letting your limbs flow where they're pushed while you float and watch, weightless and wondering. You could even close your eyes and sense his touch sometimes when he came close to the front of your mind – like he was laying on top of you, a soft warm blanket made out of breath.

He never seemed angry at you or Yuugo for putting him where he was. If he was, he was the only one who knew how to hide his feelings completely.

He still shows up in your dreams, but these days, he's mostly silent. And it's not the same, anyway. Even your subconscious knows you can't talk to him anymore.

* * *

_You pushed me forward so confidently, and now you're gone._

* * *

Yuugo you miss in a very different way. He hadn't been absorbed directly into you, he'd come with Yuuri and been shoehorned into two different consciousnesses by force and maybe that was why he never seemed to fit quite as neatly into the thought patterns of everyone else; Yuuto and Yuuri stacked neatly on top of each other and Yuugo felt almost like an afterthought, always blocking something out or confusing signals. The other two locked into you and wouldn't let go – _he_ squeezed out from the cracks in the puzzle pieces, leaking restless energy and making your skin fizz with his contagious, outsized emotions.

He didn't want to be in there. You know that; you know he hated being trapped inside your slower reflexes and your unfamiliar center of balance and your hands that lacked calluses from gripping D-Wheel handlebars and tools. You _know_ and you feel guilty that you wish he was still inside them so badly.

His voice had been loud and bright and sometimes gave you a headache, but it was still the first to raise whenever he felt your heart begin to race. Yuugo laughed when your eyes saw exhilarating or charming things together; Yuugo screamed when you crested the top of the roller coasters in the restored Heartland parks and refused to let him squeeze them shut; Yuugo faded respectfully into the background when they prickled with tears and you'd pull the pads of your goggles down over your eyes, even though the glass only hid the tears from the people on the outside. He'd hated being trapped, yes, but he'd loved you like the brother you never had even so. And you'd felt braver with him as your constant wingman, you really had.

You imagine him a universe away, back in the newly recreated Synchro Dimension, riding the highways sometimes with Rin's arms around his waist and sometimes with his arms around hers, and you wonder whether he ever looks at his hands and thinks about when they were yours.

Probably, he's just relieved they're not anymore.

* * *

_You wanted to be connected to me so badly, and now you're gone._

* * *

Yuuri … you're not sure whether you _miss_ him, exactly, or whether his soul was just so impossible to ignore when it was wrapped around yours that its absence feels like a profound loss. Yuuri felt heavy and hot and cold at the same time when he leaned on your mind and slyly pulled on your muscles like puppet strings – not that you let him take full control if you could help it. He'd been a smoldering coal inside your skull.

Even now, with distance, you struggle to nail down exactly how having him inside you made you feel. How had someone with such a frail body to begin with manage to fit so much anger, so much dull emptiness (and he insisted he wasn't depressed even though you could all feel his emotions of lack of), so much caustic passion inside it? Let alone yours?

You'd tried your best to influence him for the better while he was your captive audience. You'd shown him the love you had from your friends and family; you'd taken him to see beautiful sights and mentally pinched him when he scoffed. You'd pulled him up beside you when you ran your Entertainment Duels and you'd pretended not to notice when you felt little sparks of excitement and genuine pleasure coming from his corner of your brain. In those times, sometimes you'd even let him join you the way you did with Yuuto during duels: layering yourself under him, letting your consciousnesses slide over each other, guiding his immaterial hands with your physical ones like you were leading him at a party game. He always felt like he enjoyed those moments.

Yuuri behaved the best for you, but still he overpowered the rest of you when he bothered to take notice and come to life, like perfume from a carnivorous jungle plant. There have been times when you wonder if maybe he should have been the one to keep his body. For all he'd been obsessed with sacrificing himself for the “greater good”, he may have been the strongest of all.

He's back in his own body now, of course. If he's even still alive. That's the worst thing about being separated now: it's total, the way you're separate from Mom or Dad or even Yuzu or Dennis on the other side of the globe. You have no idea what's happening with any of them at any time. You have no idea whether they get hurt, when or if they're dueling, if they're in danger, if they're resting, if they're even _alive_. It makes you feel less and less alive yourself every day.

* * *

They said Zarc went insane because of his connection to his dragons. He couldn't get the voices of his partners out of his head; he couldn't stop feeling their pain and he couldn't find peace.

You wrap your fingers around your pendant and squeeze like maybe, if you hold it tight enough to cut your flesh, _your_ partners will come welling out of your skin along with the blood.

Zarc went insane because he was never alone.

You think never _not_ being alone is going to push you down that path too.

* * *

You hope they'll be back someday, though. There's nothing certain right now, but Reiji has called you to his offices recently and spoken to you at length. He wants to open the portals between the dimensions again. He wants to understand what his father was trying to accomplish, and he wants to do it better. It could change all of our lives again, he told you, and you agreed. You tried to keep your hands from shaking, and you twisted your pendant between your fingers, and you told him you'd do whatever you could to help, because no matter how tenuous and unmoored this lead is, it's still a ladder out of the darkness you barely keep your chin above most days now.

So now you wait for his next call. You show up to school the way you did before you ever knew there were worlds outside this one, you interview people who want to know everything about you but don't really think they need to understand, and you keep dueling. You draw cards till your fingertips are striped pink and red and your wrists ache. You ignore the bruises your duel disk leaves on your arm from how long you keep it on at a time. You bury yourself in your monsters and you perform show after show for the people who want to see one of the four heroes who saved the world and you yell _Ladies and Gentlemen!_ loud enough that it doesn't sound like you're crying anymore and you Pendulum Summon and you Pendulum Summon and you Pendulum Summon and when the light comes down from the sky above you and that hole in the sky opens, ready to pull down spirits, you look up and you see the crack in the wall of the Synchro Dimension and the endless well that descended into the XYZ Dimension and the window that opened in the floor of the Fusion Dimension, and you pray for those holes in the sky to open themselves up too, and if they won't bring the other three parts of you back, then for them to suck you up and tear you in four so that at least a little of you can go to all of them.

* * *

_Become one with me, and never be gone again._


End file.
